


Carbine's Folly

by Mechanical



Category: Original Work
Genre: Cybernetics, Gen, Outer Space, POV First Person, Science Fiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-27
Updated: 2020-04-27
Packaged: 2021-03-01 18:54:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,142
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23881882
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mechanical/pseuds/Mechanical
Summary: When a hundred-thousand ton cybernetic starship deserts fourteen days after the war is won, they call in me to bring her back.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 4





	Carbine's Folly

Anneline Bakkes deserted fourteen days after the war was won. 

The enigmatic Enemy had been blasted from the stars, their hives evaporated from orbit; twenty six years of desperate bloody struggle, ending with a whimper rather than a bang. She’d spent twenty-one of those years prowling in deep space, slipping from the shadows of gas giants or asteroid belts to snatch up an Enemy ship in her jaws before disappearing again. During all that time, she had been efficient, effective, and loyal. With a laser-like focus, she berthed at space docks only long enough to rearm and refuel before she slipped out again, listening for the echoing cries of enemy nautilus in the void.

It was pretty obvious she’d desert as soon as she got the orders to stand down, but it might not seem seem so to a baseline such as yourself, sir. Sorry - ‘unaugmented’. Better term. 

Let’s start from the beginning.

Anneline Bakkes is born. 

She is born as a hundred thousand tons of steel and titanium and silicon; an arsenal of missiles and railguns, sitting on a star she holds in her guts. She feels herself spread through inertialess thrusters and weapons systems, blinks and sees gravitational waves and radio signals from pulsars gone to dust. She feels the dry heat of solar radiation on her hull.

She’s connected to the mothership, suckling on the umbilical pumping in helium-3. The voices of the med-techs and naval officers in her – little flesh things, gathered around a vat of butchered meat and wires – get blended down into waveforms and fed to her with all the other data she’s drinking in. They won’t stay long; on the mission, Bakkes won’t need anything sitting around to suck up oxygen and stare at panels. Bakkes is a one-woman warship.

_Report status, Carbine_ , they say, with nervous eyes on their instruments. They were careful midwives, but every birth has a chance of going wrong.  
_All good here, Command_. She replies, and because Bakkes was never one for waiting around: _When’s my first job?_

No, that’s not the start. Go further back. 

Long ago, Anneline Bakkes is born. 

The first time, as most people are, she is born as meat – a small, squealing lump of flopping limbs and oversized head, insensate to everything but her next meal and shitting herself. She lived a happy little meaningless life on some out-of-the way station floating somewhere near Togan’s Reach. I don’t remember its name, and its not like it matters. It’s been dust for over two decades.

It’s a good time to be born, all things considered. Heaven had been cracked open for its manna; machines, tireless and uncomplaining, chewed the stones of the asteroid belt or tilled the fields and bestowed the bounty on man. Things are… pretty nice, really. The colonies are settled, stations built, and, politely, before we can start fighting each other – the Enemy appear.

There’s a saying for that sort of situation: _outside context problem_. Hell, we still know basically nothing beyond how to break them. No higher language that we ever discovered, but they communicated somehow. Choice of targets? Invasion plans? Who knows how they ever determined what they were going to do, or even how they did it. They nearly wiped us out, and I don't even think they knew they were doing it.

One of their targets is that little station, that gets slagged along with most of the residents. Fortunately, Bakkes escaped with just a few lost limbs and third degree burns over seventy percent of her body.

Our ships were all piloted by baselines, back then. It took barely a year before we realised it was do or die; experimental programs graduated from ten years distance to field testing nearly overnight.

What? You said you wanted me to find her, sir. To explain how, I have to explain why. I can assure you she didn’t just feel it was time for a holiday.

Imagine you’re a kid. Aliens – we think – showed up. Despite the strongest efforts of man, they kick the teeth in of the defensive fleet, blow up your home, leave you a crispy morsel for their afternoon snack. Nothing left of your life but rubble delightfully rearranged into a computing substrate by aliens that abandon it immediately.

Now, imagine: after three years in a hospital bed, a bunch of men in uniform offer you a deal. Carve you up and rebuild you better. Pure machine can’t do the job. Pure meat can’t, either. Have to meet in the middle. You could refuse; wait until the docs have enough time to print and patch your body back into shape, walk away a free woman, but the hospitals are overflowing with the battered and broken and it's not like you have a life to get back to. 

So - she agrees. Anneline Bakkes is reborn as Hunter-Killer #0594, designation Carbine. She becomes the god in the machine, the deity throwing thunderbolts from the top of her metal mountain. Her senses expand far beyond the confines of human. Her mind works faster, memory offloaded onto banks of memory drives; she'll never forget a thing again. She becomes _powerful_.

What she doesn’t become is deaf. Every time she pops in for a refit, she’s harvesting all the signal pollution leaked from stations, from comms buoys. She hears the talk of the war ending. She hears how there’s plans to decommission the HKs, put them back in bodies so they can rejoin society. She hears all this, and the conclusion is pretty inevitable.

Because to Anneline Bakkes, human means nothing more than vulnerable.

Oh, I can find her, sir. She can last a long time out in the black by herself – repair drones will fix what’s broken. She can scoop He-3 from gas giants, or failing that, spread her solar panels to suckle the sunlight teat of some nearby star.

But she’ll run out of spare parts eventually. Eventually she’ll have to come in from the cold – and I’m pretty sure I know where. She’ll look for an engineer in the outer colonies, where people don’t tend to ask questions. I know a few good places. I can ask around.

And I’m going to get on Bakkes' ship, and I’m going to talk to her, and we’ll decide what we’re doing next. I’m going to try to negotiate a deal between you and her. Let her keep the ship, perhaps, maybe minus a few gigatons of warheads and the like. Because that, sir, is the only way you’re getting her to come back in.

Hmm? If she doesn’t? 

Maybe I’ll stick around with her. I always wanted a friend with a dozen nuclear launch bays.

Oh, don’t say that, sir. You don’t have a chance of catching her without me.

You’re a baseline, after all. And we augmented have to stick together.


End file.
